Content marketing is a type of marketing that strategically consists of content creation, publishing and promotion (including blog posts, emails, videos, and podcasts). Content marketing is often used to increase brand awareness and engagement, attract visitors or users, generate sales opportunities or generate revenue.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, the definition of content marketing is as follows:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer actions.”
So instead of presenting your products or services, you provide your potential customers and customers with relevant and useful content to help them solve their problems. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a relationship with your target audience. Your audience will be less likely to hesitate when it comes to finally making a purchase decision, as you have already shown that you have the relevant expertise and care enough for them to share the information.
High-quality content allows you to carry your customers and prospects along a similar path of trust (and eventually buying) without overwhelming.
Why is content marketing important?
The more important thing is understanding what content marketing than understanding why content marketing is important for your company.
First, we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:
Awareness – Before awareness, a customer may need it, but they don’t know there is a solution.
Research – When a customer realizes that there is a solution, they will do research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist and which one will suit their needs.
Reputation – At this point, the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they get a high quality product at an affordable price.
Purchase – Finally, the customer makes his decision and goes along with the transaction.
Unlike other forms of digital marketing (such as PPC or PR), content marketing can continue to offer for your business in the long run. Unlike a Facebook ad or a press release, content can continue to drive traffic, brand awareness, and potential customers for years.
What are the advantages of content marketing?
Content marketing is at the start and end point of any online campaign. That’s why there are many advantages to online business.
The best benefits of content marketing:
More targeted visits from search engines – Good content allows you to rank higher in search engines and have more targeted traffic.
More visits on social media – Good content is more likely to be shared on social media and can generate more website traffic.
Increasing user interaction – The user interacts with good content by providing comments, reviews, voting and sharing.
Good for SEO – Quality content is at the heart of SEO. Websites that combine good content with proven copywriting tips are better than websites that don’t have good content.
Increasing brand awareness – Publishing quality content is one of the best ways to promote your brand and online reputation.
More conversions – Good content can generate more leads and sales.
What are the basics of content marketing?
Define your audience
The first step to any content marketing campaign is to find your target audience.
In fact, many people try to implement content marketing practices, but do not clearly define their audience. Instead, they have a hard time revealing the right content as they are starting to find keywords directly and write blog posts. Therefore, you can achieve successful results by focusing more accurately on your marketing strategy by defining the content marketing target audience in detail.
Create content your audience will love
Now that you understand who your audience is, it’s time to create customized content for them. The best way to do this is to identify the needs of your audience. If we define these needs as problems when looking at them by the audience, create content that will help them solve the problems.
Create a content marketing plan
You have a solution about who your audience is and what it needs. Now is the time to put these findings in a step-by-step content marketing strategy. Specifically, you’ll need to create relevant content at different stages of the marketing conversion process (also known as the purchase cycle).
The goal of every step in a marketing transformation process is to push people to the next step. So you need to have content that appeals to people at every stage.
Awareness and branding
Early in the marketing transformation process, most people need some nutrition and educating to move from “I have this problem to solve” to “this is the product I need”. The beginning of the marketing transformation process helps your target customer solve a problem or problem faced by it, which helps increase brand awareness. Then your company stays in mind when the target customer is ready to make a purchase.
What are content marketing tools?
The main tools of content marketing are:
- Blog
- E-Books
- Online courses
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Web seminars (webinars)
- Product comparison articles
- Pre-launch sequences
- Product demos
- Landing pages
- Customer testimonials
If you’re not sure where to start for content marketing, check out 15 Tips for Content Marketing post.
